Work Hard To Overcome Staff's `Change Fatigue'

With all the transformation efforts going on these days, the workplace seems to have turned into one continual change initiative. Change fatigue is rampant.

The remedy: Pare down the number of initiatives. Be less preoccupied with large-scale transformation, and focus instead on small improvements.

Why change efforts fail.

"Change is one of the few areas where experts have been in violent agreement for decades," says David A. Garvin, Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of nine books, including Learning in Action.

Change efforts fail for two main reasons, Garvin says:

Poor design: These include relying on information technology to provide the magic bullet and not explicitly tackling the necessary behavioral changes.

Poor communication: Change leaders must explain the particular initiative thoroughly, letting employees hear the arguments for and against the options that were rejected. In addition, they must address employees' fears: "People want to know why you think they can make it through the change," Garvin observes. "They also want to know how you're going to help them through it."

Putting lipstick on a bulldog.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter notes that it's very difficult for leaders to spell out in advance precisely what the future state should look like -- so many who try merely get it wrong.

Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor and author of Evolve!, says a good leader uses a humbler approach that she calls IKIWISI (I'll know it when I see it). She compares it to improvisational theater: You make the best judgment you can in the moment and remain prepared to adjust to whatever new conditions arise.

Kanter likens the typical change effort to "putting lipstick on a bulldog." Here, the business leader sees something that's ugly, such as a process that needs improvement. The leader wrestles with the change, and finding it difficult to get the thing to behave properly, decides just to make it look superficially better. The result: The bulldog's "appearance hasn't improved, but now it's really angry," Kanter says.

Instead, she claims, "the key to substantive improvement lies in creating an environment in which employees don't even know that they're changing."

Kill the hero, save the change.

Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management studies at McGill University in Montreal, says the notion that change comes from the top is a fallacy driven by the American overemphasis on taking action.

Instead, most organizations succeed because of the small change efforts that begin at the middle or bottom of the company and are belatedly recognized by senior management.

Mintzberg argues that the best kind of leader doesn't try to effect much change. Rather, she functions like a queen bee, which "does nothing but make babies and exude a chemical that keeps everything together." It is the other bees that busy themselves in going out to sense the environment, find sources of sustenance for the hive and make the changes necessary to keep the hive alive in the face of an evolving environment.

Nick Morgan is editor of the Harvard Management Communication Letter. This article is condensed from one of three Harvard Business School Publishing newsletters.